With all the talk of “Islamophobia”, a buzzword used by Islam defenders to shame any criticism of Islam, one thing that rarely (if ever) gets any mention is that Islam indeed joined a privileged status, even here in the US; that it gets away with practices that would never be tolerated in any other context; and that it has taken advantage of our (misplaced) default “respect” for religion to the fullest.
I have given examples of this in the past: Islam routinely practices discriminatory traditions that Rosa Parks fought to end; it openly displays symbols of misogyny and oppression; and it cynically pays lip service to condemning terrorism while at the same time promoting the very ideological basis of terrorism. And finally, to add insult to injury, it accuses anyone who dares to call it out of intolerance; they have even coined a word for this, “Islamophobia”, to be used as a bludgeon against anyone who dares open his/her mouth about any of the above (and much more). The trick has worked like magic: as we have seen, even the British government has been too scared to act against Sharia courts that violate British law by issuing rulings against victims of domestic abuse, lest it be accused of “Islamophobia”.
The wonderful Ali Rizvi, self descried “Muslim atheist” that I have mentioned before, has a great article on the Huffington Post in which he cites a number of examples of how American Islamist organizations, most notably the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have used our fear of being politically incorrect to silence criticism of Islam. Here are some good examples:
Last month, a white American man successfully convinced the Massachusetts liberal arts school Brandeis University that he was being victimized and oppressed by a black African woman from Somalia — a woman who underwent genital mutilation at age five and travels with armed security at risk of being assassinated.
That is the power of this term.
The man, Ibrahim Hooper, is a Muslim convert and a founding member and spokesman for CAIR. The woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is an unapologetic activist for the rights of girls and women and a harsh, no-holds-barred critic of the religious ideologies (particularly the Islamic ideology in Muslim-majority countries that she experienced first-hand) that perpetuate and maintain their abuse. Having abandoned the Islamic faith of her parents and taken a stance against it, she is guilty of apostasy, a crime that is punishable by death according to most Islamic scholars, not to mention the holy text itself.
Hirsi Ali was also involved with the award-winning documentary, Honor Diaries, which explores violence against women in honor-based societies, including female genital mutilation (FGM), honor killings, domestic violence, and forced marriage. Despite featuring the voices of several practicing Muslim women, the film was deemed “Islamophobic” by — you guessed it — the poor folks at CAIR. Again, they felt they were the real victims, wanting their own voices heard while silencing those of the victims of FGM and honor killing in the film.
“So what?” you say. “It’s 2014. No one’s going to take that kind of position seriously, right?”
Wrong. Astonishingly, this ludicrous argument was enough to convince both the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan to cancel their screenings of the film.
Earlier this year, this Islamophobia-phobia also worked successfully on Katy Perry, a singer well-known for fighting her evangelical minister parents to break out of a strict Christian upbringing. Her music video for Dark Horse enraged over 60,000 angry Muslims who signed a petition demanding that it be removed for blasphemy. The video showed a man wearing an “Allah” pendant being burned to ashes, pendant and all. The scene was visible for less than a second in the original video.
She gave in. The petition was successful, and within a day, the offending scene was edited out of the video.
Astonishing examples of de facto Sharia-based rules on freedom of expression (First Amendment be damned!). But did you notice the funny word he uses to describe what is happening? “Islamophobia-phobia”: the threat of accusing someone of Islamophobia, or such accusation actually being made, to shut them up. And I think, since we are likely to come across many such example for the foreseeable future, we may just as well shorten it for easier use. Let’s call it Islamophobophobia.
